“A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible.”

A lot of people think a lot of things, but I don’t think the majority of people think the point of using LLMs is so they can produce low-quality code. Do they produce low-quality code sometimes or often? Of course. But they also produce high-quality code very often. And sometimes they just a “fine” job.

One of the promises - and there are plenty of cases where it’s met and where it falls drastically short - is that agentic coding tools can help us code faster that is just as good or better than what a human can. One of the other big ideal payoffs is that agentic coding can allow non-programmers to create things that previously required programmers to create.

We can debate as to how successful we’ve been toward the two goals above, but I think it’s misguided to say that the majority of people think LLMs should produce lower quality code.